The last few months, since our launch in February, we’ve been working on some mayor improvements. We listened very carefully to what our users came up with and we looked at the platform on we’re we would like to go in the near future. We defined a new and clear mission about what we want to achieve: Let you “Entering the world of serendipity”.

“Trip Essentials goes beyond search and entering the world of Serendipity (discovery). What’s the difference? Search is what you do when you’re looking for something. Serendipity is when something extraordinary that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know how to ask for, finds you”.

I would also love to share some Analytics with you as well. Remember, we didn’t spend any money on (online) marketing! We’re amazed ourself’s that the website engages people and the amount of people using the website actively. Imagine if we would ever have enough money to spend on Online marketing .

An overview over one month*:

• 3.360 

Visitors

• 50.668 

Pageviews

• 15,08 

Pages per visitor

• 32,35% 

Bounc ratio

• 00:16:28 

Time on site

• 36,32% 

New visitors

*Feel free to publish these Analytics on you're blog.

Why are we announcing this information? Two reasons:

1. We would love you to tell others about Trip Essentials. Spread the word! Blog about us, tell investors (we’re looking), tell you’re friends and family and maybe even tell strangers about us on conferences or even on the street *lol*. And maybe start using it you’re self? Please let us know you’re thoughts…
2. Besides the fact that we made some changes on the User Interface and made a even more attractive (we think), we also added some new tool and features.

Overview of our tools/features:

http://www.tripess.com/explore/features.html

Perfect for round trip planning

http://www.tripess.com/ginogoossens/trips/camper-roundtrip-usa-canada-2009.html

Exploring

http://www.tripess.com/explore.html 

Interesting and active profiles at the homepage

http://www.tripess.com/ 

The first tripess.com ’widget’. Please do not add it to you’re Hyves account yet, it’s under approval

http://www.tripess.com/my/gadgets.html

Background personalisation (The famous Twitter bird )

http://www.tripess.com/ginogoossens/

Trip Essentials on you’re Iphone

http://m.tripess.com 

We’re on Twitter

http://www.twitter.com/tripess

I hope you enjoyed this update and that we can continue to keep you updated on tripess.com. And remember “Spread the word! Blog about us, tell investors, tell you’re friends and family and maybe even tell strangers about us on conferences or even on the street *lol*”. 

P.S. Coming soon: Tripess Open Social and OpenID (oAuth)

Step 1
Login to you’re tripess account at www.tripess.com. Once you’re logged in choose [Profile] dropdown (don’t click on [profile] and then [Social networks] to start sharing you’re activities on Twitter.com.

Step 2:
Now you can choose you’re social network (for now we just support Twitter). Fill the fields as shown below and we connect you’re Twitter account with you’re tripess account. Don’t worry,  we won’t save you’re login information, when you click “Submit”!

Please give us you’re feedback and what other Social Networks we should add so you can start sharing you’re Travel plans throughout you’re Social Networks.

Step 1:
Login to you’re account at www.tripess.com. Once you’ve logged in, choose [my] from the above menu and than “My Trips“.

Step 2:
You will than see a complete overview of you’re planned trips. Choose one of these trips in the field on the right.

Step 3:
I have choosen my upcoming trip to the Travel Distribution Summit in London (United Kingdom). I then go one step further and get to see the detailed overview of my planned trip.

Step 4:
Than click on the tab [friends (2)] so I can see who is already connected/ invited to this trip and this is also we’re I can add more friends. I can use several different options to add or invite (new) friends to this trip:

Option 1:
Start by adding friends who are already connected/ tripess members, by simply check the check boxes [X] in front of their names.

Option 2:
Or, scroll down and star sharing with you’re other friends by simply sending them an e-mail invite [e-mail] [name]. You can add as many friends as you want.

Option 3:
Or, invite you’re contacts/ friends by using you’re Gmail, Hotmail/Live, Yahoo!, Lycos e-mail account. We won’t save you’re login information, when you click “Import Contact”!

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to add new friends/ tripess members to a trip, so you can create a guest passport and let you’re friends interact and share the fun before you’re upcoming holiday.

Step 1:
Go to the Trip Essentials website at www.tripess.com. Click on the [Register now] button at the homepage.

Step 2:
Fill in the form as shown below. Make sure you’re using a existing e-mail address because we’re using a activation link to make you’re tripess account definite. Attention: You’re screen name should not contain spaces. Wrong: trip essentials. Correct: tripessentials.

Step 3:
Great! You are almost a member of Trip Essentials. Just to make sure it was you who created this account and make sure we get your trust, just click the activation link below and your account is definite.

Step 4:
That was great and really easy! You’re now on you’re personal member page. You can now create you’re first “new upcoming trip” by using the “create a new trip wizard” or install the personal bookmarker into you’re browser. We support the following browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.

Trip Essentials (TripEss) is an online Travel service designed to make your Travel experience more active and stimulating. Trip Essentials Travel service can help you, while you explore different Travel websites (e.a. lastminute, expedia, booking, hotels etc.) discover, save and share your future plans with friends, family, colleagues and locals.

Once you saved your favorite accommodations or hotels you can; -sort, compare, forward, etc. Trip Essentials also marks coincidences, for example two other people also visited this hotel or four other people from your friends network will be in Barcelona at that time too.

Trip Essentials has offices in an old fire department (Blushuis) in Breda, The Netherlands.

The international team behind Trip Essentials is led by founder CEO Gino Goossens, CCO Sjoerd van Oosten, partner E-Sites and partner Moore Intelligence.com. Trip Essentials is privately funded by the international team.

Create your account.

Manage your account.

Add new tripes and manage your Tripsets.

Manage your friends and invite new friends.

View destinations and sort all your destination to compare and book.

Detailed information about destinations including: Weather, CO2 emission + edit, share and rate functionalities.

Real-time weather and Co2 emission information.

A list of all your selected destination/ accommodations with a detailed view option + ratings.

We love our new Tripess.com mobile website and we hope you will to! Please, keep giving us the feedback we’ve been receiving through e-mail or this blog! Soon hopefully also available in the Apple App-store…

To see all the screen photos, go to our Trip Essentials Flickr photo set.

Frankwatching.nl is the number one weblog about Technology, Internet and Innovations in The Netherlands. They did a post about us.

We were even called ‘This year’s Dopplr’ on a weblog.

A journalist from the Amsterdam newspaper ‘Het Parool’ mentioned that “her Trip would have been completely different if she had used Trip Essentials and the Serendipity effect”.

Reisrevue announced us as a “Travel comparer with serendipity” and a welcome new website.

[update Saturday 14 February 2009] The #1 weblog DutchCowboys writes a post about Trip Essentials.

And many more…

Thank you all for your contributions and we hope we will meet your expectations.

Through our blog, group and newsletter we would like to start the conversations with you on how we can make tripEss.com better, faster, more beautiful and functional for you.

These communication channels are also going to be where we will announce new features, developments, start-up hick-ups, fix problems etc. And we will talk about our philosophy behind tripEss.com, why we started the services and how we want to change the world with this Intelligent Travel service.

About: Trip Essentials (TripEss) is an online Travel service designed to make your Travel experience more active and stimulating. Trip Essentials Travel service can help you, while you explore different Travel websites (e.a. lastminute, expedia, booking, hotels etc.), save and share your future plans with friends, family, colleagues and locals.

What are you waiting for? Join us at Facebook!

Why? What did we do to deserve such a prestigious nomination?

There are two reasons why we got nominated:

1.) When people are using the service of Trip Essentials and add the favorite accommodations/ hotels to a tripset, we give CO2 emission kilogram information for different kind of ways people could travel; -by foot, bus, train, car or airplane.  This creates awareness and let people think about the way they could travel to their next destination. Also we keep track on how many miles/ kilometers people traveled and what the total CO2 emission is for different travel types.
2.) We give tips to business travelers to become more efficient to plan their business trips by recommending appointments in the same city. Travel & Serendipity creates this effect because it marks coincidences and shows you who lives or will be in that city the same time you will be there to. This way we create more awareness and the opportunity to save fuel, minimize CO2 emission and even to be more efficient in planning your next trip. In the near future we also should be able to tell who is the most environmentally aware travel organization in different ways of traveling around the globe (KLM, Oad, TUI, Expedia, Lastminute.com, …). Maybe even create our own award to give each year to the most environmentally aware travel organization in the world. So which Travel organization is able to sell the best mix of different ways to travel to a destination?

The award show is this Tuesday the 13th in Utrecht during the holiday grant profession day. We sure hope we stand a chance! Wish us luck!

Celebrating our moment at Trip Essentials office in Breda, The Netherlands
You can find more pictures about Trip Essentials here.

At this moment were pitching Trip Essentials to (private) investors/ venture capitalists to develop and market trip.Ess more and more the coming years. Investors who are intersted can always send me and e-mail (ginogoossens[at]gmail[dot]com) or call me at +31 (0)6-24115440. Will continue giving updates on developments as well; -things were struggling with as a start-up and how we solved and faced problems the last year and coming years.

Were getting a lot of support and most people we talk to about trip.Ess are really enthusiastic about the service and can’t wait to start using it. Well same here! We can’t wait to introduce trip.Ess to you!